


Contradiction of Pain

by gloss



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Huddling For Warmth, Introspection, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 08:00:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17280152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: Leia, Poe, and Finn crashlanded on this snowy space rock nine days ago.





	Contradiction of Pain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rubynye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/gifts).



> Title from Nikki Giovanni's "Laws of Motion".
> 
> Happy birthday to Rubynye; I hope this amuses <3333

_If sweet is the opposite of sour and heat the_  
 _absence of cold then love is the contradiction of pain and_  
 _beauty is in the eye of the beheld_ \-- Nikki Giovanni, "The Laws of Motion"  
  
Leia’s father used to say that being responsible meant being willing to _bear_ responsibility and blame. She’d always disliked that precept; she could be responsible, and has been, without shouldering unnecessary blame.

Now, when there’s no reason to be either responsible or blameworthy, she can’t help feeling both. Looking back, she can admit that mistakes in judgment were made. She did not need to travel to the treaty negotiations with both Dameron and Finn, for instance. She’s afforded so little in the way of vanities these days that the prospect of appearing on the arms of the dashing pilot/spy and the handsome defector proved irresistible.

That is not to say that _everything_ is her fault. She had nothing to do with the sabotage to their nav-systems, nor (despite some of Han's more exaggerated accusations in the past) with the geography of deep space. (To which, he'd beg her, he'd like her to "shove it".)

Shove what? She'd still like to know.

His ghost merely shakes his head in that impatient way he always had. _You know damn well, your highness._

"You're smiling," Poe says now. He brings the storm with him, its tang and scent and ferocity; he slaps his cheeks as he joins her beside the stove.

“Am I?”

“Let me in on the joke?” He slips out of first layer of clothing and, shaking it out, offers it to her.

“No joke,” she tells him and lets him wrap the coat around her. She could refuse, they could dispute and argue, he would eventually prevail, but there’s no need to stand on ceremony, not any more. She’s cold (they all are) and another layer is welcome.

That means, however, Poe hunches a little more severely now. His jaw is set, the skin across his cheeks both dry and raw, and his eyes are permanently squinted against the cold.

“Come here,” Leia says and reaches for him; Poe ducks close and wriggles, getting the cloak back up over his shoulder. “Better?”

“Better.”

“Idiot,” she says fondly.

He opens his mouth to protest, then thinks better of it. He nods instead.

“I was wondering whether this is all my fault,” she says. She keeps looking out through the slit viewport. She knows him well enough; he’ll be ready to argue that point, intent on defending her (to herself!), and then, eventually, he’ll subside. Maybe sulk a bit until the subject is changed.

“It’s no one’s fault,” he says. “Or everyone’s.”

She snorts lightly. “Collective failure?”

“Sure,” Poe says. “Like the sound of that.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Like it better than you hogging all the blame to yourself,” he says and wriggles again, tucking the cloak more snugly over her lap and leaving his arm around her waist. “That’s just...”

He’s grinning. In the low, erratic light from the stove, he looks alternately eerie and jocular. 

“Prerogative,” she says for him. “Royal, or rank, or age, I can claim all three.”

His arm is warm around her. His fingertips are tucked into an outer pocket of her parka, still several layers away from skin, but close enough.

Close enough for _what_ , princess?

“He’s late,” Poe says in a bit.

“You’re impatient,” she replies. “He’s not late until the alarm sounds.” They have the alarm set to keep them inside for the duration of the rock's journey through the radiation clouds around its dying star.

“I still don’t like this.”

“Noted,” she says. “Many times, in fact. Countless.”

For all his enthusiastic, nearly unfettered belief in Finn’s genius, emotional capacity, and physical competence, Poe is also, simultaneously, ridiculously protective of the man.

“Heard from the droids?” Poe asks, rather than acknowledge her dig.

“Threepio’s still a protocol droid, ill-favored for this sort of assignment,” she says, “and BB-8 is having the time of his life. So, no change.”

The droids are drilling into the microplanet’s core, chasing the faintest electromagnetic signals in search of aid. Some asteroids, after all, have been found to contain elaborate subterranean consciousnesses and bacterial civilizations. It would be well outside the realm of likelihood for this _particular_ space rock to contain anything like that, but Poe is impossible to dissuade when he wrangles up any shred of hope.

Leia and Finn could only exchange meaningful glances while Poe directed the droids to get to drilling. Leia hoped that her glance said, _he’s wonderful, but really?_ Finn’s expression was harder to read; she got fondness from it, of course, but also a strong dose of impatience and skepticism.

“Commander—Captain—!” Threepio had stammered.

“Poe, it’s just Poe, you _know_ it’s Poe.” When Threepio didn’t respond, Poe straightened up and faced him. “What is it?”

“As a protocol droid, I am more than well-equipped to participate in over five thousand distinct ceremonies, events, and topics of uncontroversial conversation. I am not, however, at all suited to, to, to—!”

BB-8 trilled loud and shrilly, drowning out Threepio, when he succeeded in modifying his torch array into drill.

“Handling tricky situations is your calling,” Poe told Threepio and clasped him by the shoulder. “When Beebs makes contact, we need you to supervise. Be all polite and that kind of shit.”

“Of course, of course. I must insist, however—“

Poe had turned away to study the rough map BB-8 was projecting. “Let’s save your insistence for later, ok?”

“When will be later?”

Poe hid his grin behind his hand. “We’ll know it when we get there. Can you lend Beeb some torque in the meantime?”

The look Finn gave Leia then had lost all doubt. It was sunny, delighted, and then delighted all over again to share its delight with her. She smiled back and said to Poe, “Well done. What should we do?”

“You stay warm,” he said. “Me and Finn’ll set up a transmitter and reinforce the shelter.”

“I _can_ move.”

“Of course you can,” he said. Leia wasn’t sure whether she was imagining the pity in his voice. He returned her gaze as he always had, frank and open.

She’d gotten banged up in the crash, but everyone had; their shuttle was totalled. Even BB-8 was dented in several places. 

“I’ll code the transmitter message,” she told him, as firmly as she could, “and you two check the perimeter.”

“LET GO OF THAT!” Threepio shrieked amid a shower of sparks. He kicked BB-8’s side. “This is incredibly dangerous!”

“He only just noticed?” Finn asked the room.

They crashed nine days ago. They’ve pushed the fragments of the shuttle into this crevasse, which, while not out of the wind, is at least sheltered from it enough that you can speak without having to shout. They’ve sent out fourteen separate coded distress calls, cycling through one after the other. Having finished the emergency rations, they now drink melted snow that tastes like tears and eat starchy noodles extruded from one of BB-8’s more creative modifications.

There’s something in the wind out there. They’ve all seen its outline, heard its roar. Threepio claims to have spotted its prints in the snow, but he (conveniently, Finn notes) forgot to record a holo-image.

The rest of the resistance, all forty souls, are three-quarters of the way across the galaxy, isolated and, Leia must assume, uncertain-shading-to-forlorn. Not frightened, not so long as Rey is there, but Rey isn’t a leader. Not like Poe or Finn; she’s strong enough to take care of herself but caring for others comes to her with difficulty. She trusts that everyone’s as capable as she is. Leia envies her that.

Responsibility means recognizing your own failings, lacunae, incapacities. Leia learned that several times over: with Ben, and Han, and then with Luke, and Han again. (She and Han shared, if nothing else, the kind of hard-headed stubbornness that meant lessons must be learned many times, each more painful and sorrowing than the last.)

“Good news or bad news first?” Finn asks when he returns, just a few minutes shy of the alarm. He stamps the ice off his boots and pounds shut the three shuttle fragments that intervene between them and the constant storm.

“There’s good news?” Leia asks. She and Poe strip off the tarps that Finn has wrapped around himself, then hustle him awkwardly to the stove. He’s breathing hard, sweat springing up across his cheeks. The ice coating his lashes sparkles to water, then steams away.

“Eat,” Poe urges. “Food, then news.”

“Let’s have noodles!” Finn says brightly, as he always does, and Poe laughs appreciatively, as _he_ always does. “Can’t think of anything else I’d like more.”

They bracket him, Poe’s cloak around their shoulders and pulled up over Finn’s head. He slurps up his noodles and warms his limbs; gradually, the tremor wavering through him slows, then disappears. When his plate is empty, Leia takes it from his hands while Poe wraps both arms around Finn’s neck and kisses him thoroughly.

These two have been, from the very first, demonstrative: not just holding hands in briefings but kissing goodbye before one departed on a mission, sharing clothes, _touching_ each other whenever necessary. Leia remembers the thrill of touching Han or Luke, secret and sly, the sense that she was violating some protocol. Poe and Finn violate nothing. Their touch seems to come to them as naturally as words and breath.

Their kiss slackens until, finally, Poe’s face is resting in the curve of Finn’s shoulder and Finn turns back to Leia, adjusting the cloak as he does.

“The good news isn’t much,” he says, and shrugs in apology. “Just that there’s no bad news. And the bump to power we got from Threepio’s head is holding.”

Poor Threepio. She nods and starts to ask a question.

It’s automatic, the need to question an underling giving a report. It’s automatic, and obsolete, and she is—they are—better than that.

Instead, Finn opens his arm and gathers her in, until she’s curled up against his chest, nearly mirroring Poe. They _were_ going to sleep in shifts, that had been the original plan, but it never held. Their bodies had other needs, for warmth and company and whatever ineffable thing it is that means Poe’s snores and Finn’s embrace are louder and stronger than any storm.

They took her between them, with them, without fuss or comment. They hold her like she's something precious and she regards them with both awe and worry, concern and deep, sudden-sprung _love_.

When she came to after the crash, she was so rattled and confused that she thought she was on Hoth, thought the Imperials were closing in and Han was mouthing off. She thought Poe—face bloodied, hair whipped in the storm, eyes black with terror—was his mother, yelled at him to wake up and get to work. They dragged Finn’s unconscious body into this crevasse and she left Poe there, banging on Finn’s chest as he sobbed and swore, to retrieve the emergency packs. Hoth is at the far end of her life, but that cold was always with her, always will be.

It’s not her fault that three of them have ended up like this, woven together so closely that their puffs of breath appear simultaneously. She remembers Han and Luke, lifting a furry hide to beckon her back to bed; she’d shaken her head, claimed responsibilities, chided them for laziness.

This time, she does none of those things. She shifts closer to Finn and stretches to take Poe’s hand in her own. Finn's kiss is warm and tastes like Poe and Poe's grasp is as sure and strong as ever. She’s looking for the right words to say she doesn’t regret, at long last, anything.


End file.
